Indian language wikipedia community has so far been looking at more of input statistics, like # of pages, page depth to measure their growth. Using absolute numbers based on content contribution is not a right metric to compare the languages. Outcome based measures like the # of unique visitors per Million speakers is a better measure. Instead of looking at ranking based on value, comparison between groups of languages based on grades can show better insights. I present here the same for Indian languages with more than 1 Million primary and secondary speakers. I have excludeded Sanskrit, Bishnupriya Manipuri (score of >10000) . I have dropped English (>10000) as it is a worldwide language and is not useful for comparison. I have included Chinese(zh) as that language has similar problems as our with regard to use on computers.
It shows Malayalam tops the list and is on par with Chinese (approximately 150). Tamil. Telugu, Marathi are in the second group(>50), Kannada, Urdu,Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali(>25) are in third group. Assuming that these language communities have similar issues with regard to Wikipedia, this trend is expected to continue for the next decade. Only surprise element may be, if Hindi beats the prediction and emerges as the top, because of it being treated as a national language and incorporating it in the curriculum. These statistics I hope will make the Indian Wikipedian communities think about what needs to be done to move to the top grade. Another interesting analysis on how soon these will grow would be, to look at the number of active Wikipedians and what is being done to prmote wikipedia in these communities. I will plan that for a later post. Meawhile I look forward to your feedback.
For those, who are interested in the inputs for this analysis, I have taken the daily statistics on 2009-09-01 and the language population numbers at wiki for generating this chart.
Indian Wikipedias-Grading based on Traffic Analysis
Labels: indian , languages , statistics , telugu , wikipedia
Promoting Indian Language Wikipedias
Wikipedia in Indian languages are of great help to bridge the information gap. Concerted effort to promote Wikipedia awareness is needed. I have created a presentation showing snapshots of Indian language Wikipedia pages, which can be used at any relevant event to promote Wikipedia.
This was done on Ubuntu 8.10 with Open office 2.4, Firefox, Inkscape. There are certain difficulties in attempting this, as I am not a polyglot and know only four languages. This will also be useful for wikipedians tocompare the visual appearance of wikipedia in different languages and plan improvements in their own language version. Improvement ideas and help with additional text/content for the languages is welcome.